Skin in the Game

Metadata

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Full Title: Skin in the Game
Category: #books

###5 key takeaways

Skin in the game is the ultimate filter. Decisions made by people who personally bear the upside and downside stay grounded and antifragile; when actors are shielded (bureaucrats, academics, “experts” paid only for opinions), complexity mushrooms, hidden risks pile up, and collapse becomes likely.
A tiny, intransigent minority can steer the majority. Because rules must satisfy those who refuse to bend, as little as 3–4 % of a population with strong “soul in the game” can dictate norms for everyone—especially inside large, centralized systems. Decentralization keeps that leverage local and contained.
Ethics should trump legality—and incentives must align. Take advice only from people who pay a penalty if they’re wrong; distrust regulations, products, or professions where harms are socialized and gains are privatized. Over time law should converge toward ethical skin-in-the-game standards, not the reverse.
Employees trade freedom for dependability. Firms “buy” reliability by sharing enough risk with workers (show up or get fired). Owners, sole-practitioners, and name-on-the-door entrepreneurs face fuller exposure—and their brands signal that commitment.
Knowledge must stay coupled to real-world contact. Most breakthroughs come from tinkering first and formal theory later; studying courage, math, or risk only in books makes you no braver, smarter, or safer. Authenticity—even visible flaws—beats polished detachment because it signals genuine exposure to consequences.

Highlights

in academia there is no difference between academia and the real world; in the real world, there is. (Location 301)
How is it that maximally intolerant minorities run the world and impose their taste on us? (Location 327)
How is it that we have more slaves today than we did during Roman times? (Location 328)
We retain from this first vignette that, just like Antaeus, you cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. (Location 355)
And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad. (Location 356)
I have shown in Antifragile that most things that we believe were “invented” by universities were actually discovered by tinkering and later legitimized by some type of formalization. (Location 359)
one should not mess with a system if the results are fraught with uncertainty, (Location 396)
Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of his or her actions. (Location 432)
In general, the more people worship the sacrosanct state (or, equivalently, large corporations), the more they hate skin in the game. (Location 475)
“Deal with weaker states as you think it appropriate for stronger states to deal with you.” (Location 554)
the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people’s feelings. (Location 564)
if bankers’ profits accrue to them, while their losses are somewhat quietly transferred to society (the Spanish grammar specialists, assistant schoolteachers …), there is a fundamental problem by which hidden risks will continuously increase, until the final blowup. (Location 598)
Avoid taking advice from someone who gives advice for a living, unless there is a penalty for their advice. (Location 604)
we may not know beforehand if an action is foolish—but reality knows. (Location 619)
Entire fields (say economics and other social sciences) become themselves charlatanic because of the absence of skin in the game connecting them back to earth (Location 628)
Being wrong, when it is not costly, doesn’t count—in a way that’s similar to trial-and-error mechanisms of research. (Location 640)
By definition, what works cannot be irrational; (Location 660)
Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). (Location 719)
you are an investor in a company, doing ultra-boring things like reading the footnotes of a financial statement (where the real information is to be found) becomes, well, almost not boring. (Location 728)
Many kids would learn to love mathematics if they had some investment in it, and, more crucially, they would build an instinct to spot its misapplications. (Location 750)
people with good lawyers can game regulations (Location 753)
regulations, once in, stay in, and even when they are proven absurd, politicians are afraid of repealing them, (Location 755)
People who are not morally independent tend to fit ethics to their profession (with a minimum of spinning), rather than find a profession that fits their ethics. (Location 790)
tarda—the villainous takes the short road, virtue the longer one. In other words, cutting corners is dishonest. (Location 801)
The mere presence of an assistant suspends your natural filtering—and its absence forces you to do only things you enjoy, and progressively steer your life that way. (Location 814)
(By assistant here I exclude someone hired for a specific task, such as grading papers, helping with accounting, or watering plants; just some guardian angel overseeing all your activities). (Location 815)
many people mistaken for entrepreneurs fail to have true skin in the game in the sense that their aim is to either cash out by selling the company they helped create to someone else, or “go public” by issuing shares in the stock market. (Location 827)
Products or companies that bear the owner’s name convey very valuable messages. (Location 837)
There is something offensive in having a nationality without skin in the game, just to travel and pass borders, without the downside that comes with the passport. (Location 848)
For studying courage in textbooks doesn’t make you any more courageous than eating cow meat makes you bovine. (Location 861)
Is it that academia (and journalism) is fundamentally the refuge of the stochastophobe tawker? That is, the voyeur who wants to watch but not take risks? It appears so. (Location 869)
Given the number of people trying to get on the money-making bus, there is a progressive accumulation of Black Swan risks in such systems. Then, boom, the systemic blowup happens.fn1 (Location 908)
Beware of the person who gives advice, telling you that a certain action on your part is “good for you” while it is also good for him, while the harm to you doesn’t directly affect him. (Location 1049)
As the Romans were fully aware, one lauds merrily the merchandise to get rid of it. (Location 1084)
You can give advice, or you can sell (by advertising the quality of the product), and the two need to be kept separate. (Location 1087)
The ethical is always more robust than the legal. Over time, it is the legal that should converge to the ethical, never the reverse. (Location 1105)
No person in a transaction should have certainty about the outcome while the other one has uncertainty. (Location 1130)
So we exercise our ethical rules, but there is a limit—from scaling—beyond which the rules cease to apply. (Location 1175)
And that is what plagues socialism: people’s individual interests do not quite work well under collectivism. (Location 1207)
Groups behave differently at a different scale. (Location 1210)
The skin-in-the-game definition of a commons: a space in which you are treated by others the way you treat them, where everyone exercises the Silver Rule. (Location 1214)
am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; and at the family and friends level, a socialist. (Location 1220)
The Swiss are obsessive about governance—and indeed their political system is neither “left” nor “right,” but governance-based. (Location 1224)
- Note: Loom into swiss system
In sum, both the doctor and the patient have skin in the game, though not perfectly, but administrators don’t—and they seem to be the cause of the troubling malfunctioning of the system. (Location 1293)
The main idea behind complex systems is that the ensemble behaves in ways not predicted by its components. (Location 1304)
Studying individual ants will almost never give us a clear indication of how the ant colony operates. (Location 1305)
It suffices for an intransigent minority—a certain type of intransigent minority—with significant skin in the game (or, better, soul in the game) to reach a minutely small level, say 3 or 4 percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. (Location 1309)
Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer (who looks at the standard average) would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. (Location 1311)
An honest person will never commit criminal acts, but a criminal will readily engage in legal acts. (Location 1340)
Let us call such minority an intransigent group, and the majority a flexible one. And their relationship rests on an asymmetry in choices. (Location 1341)
Purely monotheistic religions such as Protestant Christianity, Salafi Islam, or fundamentalist atheism accommodate literalist and mediocre minds that cannot handle ambiguity. (Location 1510)
Another attribute of decentralization, and one that the “intellectuals” opposing an exit of Britain from the European Union (Brexit) don’t get: if one needs, say, a 3 percent threshold in a political unit for the minority rule to take its effect, and on average the stubborn minority represents 3 percent of the population, with variations around the average, then some states will be subject to the rule, but not others. If, on the other hand, we merge all states in one, then the minority rule will prevail all across. This is the reason the U.S.A. works so well. (Location 1519)
it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. (Location 1532)
Once a moral rule is established, it will suffice to have a small, intransigent minority of geographically distributed followers to dictate a norm in society. (Location 1541)
The psychological experiments on individuals showing “biases” do not allow us to automatically understand aggregates or collective behavior, nor do they enlighten us about the behavior of groups. (Location 1630)
So employees exist because they have significant skin in the game—and the risk is shared with them, enough risk for it to be a deterrent and a penalty for acts of undependability, such as failing to show up on time. You are buying dependability. (Location 1727)
An employee is—by design—more valuable inside a firm than outside of it; that is, more valuable to the employer than the marketplace. (Location 1768)
The original Aramaic version had a wild ass, instead of a wolf, showing off his freedom. But the wild ass ends up eaten by the lion. Freedom entails risks—real skin in the game. Freedom is never free. (Location 1807)
Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. (Location 1842)
Why did they care? Well, the higher you go in that business, the more insecure you get, as losing an argument to a lesser person exposes you more than if you lose to some hotshot. (Location 1856)
People whose survival depends on qualitative “job assessments” by someone of higher rank in an organization cannot be trusted for critical decisions. (Location 1882)
all it takes is a very small number of detractors using misplaced buzzwords of the type that makes people cringe (such as “racist”) to scare an entire institution. Institutions are employees—vulnerable, reputation-conscious employees. (Location 1974)
those who engage in smear campaigning as a profession are necessarily incompetent at everything else—hence at that business too—so the industry accumulates rejects who are prone to ethical stretches. (Location 1980)
When I saw Donald Trump in the Republican primary standing next to other candidates, I became certain he was going to win that stage of the process, no matter what he said or did. Actually, it was because he had visible deficiencies. Why? Because he was real, and the public—composed of people who usually take risks, not the lifeless non-risk-taking analysts we will present in the next chapter—would vote anytime for someone who actually bled after putting an icepick in his hand rather than someone who did not. (Location 2077)
Arguments that Trump was a failed entrepreneur, even if true, actually prop up this argument: you’d even rather have a failed real person than a successful one, as blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between a human and a ghost. (Location 2080)